Queen of the Night

him; in doing so he must castrate himself.'
    'And?' Murranus asked.
    'It's a parable.' Claudia leaned over and kissed him on the tip of his nose. 'In the arena, Murranus, you entertain, you give pleasure to the mob. But in the end you're not only killing other people, you're killing yourself. If we are to marry,' Claudia breathed in deeply, 'that must stop.'
    Murranus got to his feet and placed his hands on her shoulders. 'You mean that?'
    'I know that.' She smiled.
    'If I don't agree, whom would you marry?'
    'Burrus.' Claudia kept her face impassive.
    Murranus burst out laughing. He leaned down and kissed her on the brow.
    'In which case,' he whispered, 'it's time we talked about this business.'
    Claudia looked away across the haunted heathland, the gorse and grass now shifting in the quickening breeze. The heat haze was thinning. She had got what she'd come for.
    'It's time,' she murmured, 'it's time we went back.' She held her hand out warningly. 'Remember what I've said and what you have promised.'
    Murranus seized her hand and they left; halfway down, Claudia paused and, standing on tiptoe, kissed him swiftly on the cheek. They continued along the dusty trackway on to the paved via which would lead round to the Flavian Gate. At first Claudia hid her pleasure and excitement by chattering to Murranus, but the day's heat was now dying and the traffic on the thoroughfare had increased, making conversation difficult. Time and again they had to stand aside to allow a cohort or maniple go swinging by under their hoarse-voiced officers. Farmers and peasants, their families bundled into the carts they'd left outside the city gates, were now returning to the countryside. Other wagons heaped with provisions were lumbering towards the city to take advantage of the imperial decree which allowed them in once night had fallen. Claudia watched them go and quoted from Juvenal's Satires, the poet's famous diatribe against the noise at night in Rome's busy streets. Murranus nodded in agreement.
    Soon Claudia fell silent, doing something she loved: observing and studying what was happening around her. For a while she and Murranus walked with a group of tramping hawkers, each of whom had a tray of cheap jack goods slung around their necks ready to sell. Claudia bought a few hair pins, a comb for Poppaoe, a fine Egyptian knife for Narcissus and a set of bracelets depicting a Thracian facing charging boars for Oceanus, the one-eared former gladiator supposedly in charge of security at the She Asses. The hawkers eventually left the via to shelter under some trees. Claudia then listened to a Numidian muleteer chattering in the lingua franca of the ports as he described the news he'd heard about Licinius, Emperor of the East and Constantine's rival, who was apparently lurking in Nicomedea planning to take Constantine's empire, as Constantine and his mother were plotting in Rome to take his. This flow of news ceased abruptly when the Numidian became involved in an acrimonious dispute with eight Syrian litter-bearers, their hair greased and plaited, all dressed in the same livery, who were carrying a large, plump matron back to her 'dear husband' in Rome. Claudia then decided to follow a cart of actors who were eager to supple-ment their income by telling their fellow travellers stories from Rome's past. A young man with a bell-like voice was declaiming extracts from the historian Suetonius about Caligula, who had lived almost three hundred years earlier.
    'Oh yes,' the actor shouted from the tail of the cart. 'He was so depraved,' the man's hand slipped to his crotch and he made an obscene gesture, 'he used to go into the Imperial Gardens and make love to the moon, whom he regarded as his wife.'
    This immediately provoked a shocked denial from a woman in the audience and the declamation was transformed, much to the delight of all, into a fierce slanging match about sexual practices. Claudia half listened as she studied the props piled on the huge cart pulled by serene-looking bullocks. She recognised the grotesque face masks, the imitation jars, the pieces of scenery which could be hastily assembled to fashion a tree, a wall or the door of a house. She recalled her own days with Felix journeying from town to town: such a strange time, always on the move. Since she had settled at the She Asses, her life had been transformed. She was a secret official of the Empress, a confidante of the powerful Presbyter Sylvester and, she concluded wryly,